Brace yourselves - tweeting gloves are coming

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake's Hashtag sketch didn't "only" go viral last year, but also inspired four students to create gloves that can be used to...wait for it...send tweets.

At the 24-hour hackathon at Mount Holyoke College in the United States, four students created a very specific wearable tech in the form of gloves that tweet things you say to them.

So how do they work? First you do the hasthtag motion with two fingers on both hands (Fallon and Timberlake do it best), and after that you just speak to your gloves, whatever you want to tweet.

Using smartphones and other mobile technology during the winter times has always been a huge challenge for developers, and a lot of people risk freezing their hands and slipping on ice, breaking a hand or a hip, just to update that Facebook status, or to tweet how a pedestrian in front of them just face-planted the pavement because he was on his phone.

That big challenge, together with the Fallon / Timberlake (probably copyrighted) hashtag move, prompted the students to create this new technology.

"The original idea was for snowboarding. If somebody can’t take their hands out of their pockets, they could use the gloves to say ‘that was a great run’ or something", says Keenen Zucker.

"There’s conductive fabric on the tips of the fingers, and we put a voltage across them," said Byron Wasti. “And then you just short it, and it detects when you short the signal. It’s really basic.

Even though it's still a long way from a final product, they hope that once it's ready, it could be sold for around £32 pounds.

What are your thoughts on this latest piece of wearable tech? Let us know in the comments section below.